Up and Down Wall Street

Better to Watch Than to Play

Valuations of some new tech stocks are reminiscent of those of the dot-com era. Europe remains on a slippery slope.

While the Standard & Poor's 500 index hit 2000 last week, it was feeling more like 1999.

One might think the calendar had been turned back to those wonderfully wacky days of the dot-com bubble, when anything having to do with the Internet was seen as a lottery ticket guaranteed to pay off big. If you doubted that, you were dismissed as some slack-jawed simpleton who, in the ultimate put-down of the period, "doesn't get...